PREENING LINGERIE MODELS! Hot chicks making out . . . with each other! General debauchery! Such was the advance billing for Barstool Sports’s second annual cover model of the year party, which went down at Boston’s Mansion nightclub last month.

Sadly, a prior commitment kept me away. But I figured Dave Portnoy, Barstool’s founder and publisher, would happily recreate the bacchanalia for me. Judging from photos of previous Barstool shindigs, Portnoy’s publication had transcended mere print status and become a kind of licentious lifestyle brand; I thought Portnoy would carry himself accordingly, like a low-rent Hugh Hefner or New England’s answer to Joe Francis.

Not so. Portnoy didn’t wear a smoking jacket to our interview; he didn’t have a bimbo on each arm; he didn’t smack the waitress’s butt and promise to make her a star. Beforehand, Portnoy had described himself as the most average-looking guy imaginable, and he was right: nothing about his face or physique or dress stood out.

His description of the previous night’s festivities, meanwhile, was laconic and wholly unsexy. (“We have the lingerie show, which is, I guess, seven to 10 girls in lingerie . . . I’d never seen one until we started doing it. They walk out in lingerie, like a fashion show.”) There were some good anecdotes, but they dealt with unexpected subjects: Portnoy busting some would-be thieves who were trying to make off with an assortment of cover-model posters, say (“I’m like, hey guys, we need those . . . and they’re like, . . . ‘You’re gay’ ”), or Portnoy’s mother yelling at him for keeping people waiting outside the Mansion, (“She’s like, ‘You have to let these people in.’ It’s like, Ma!”). Hef he ain’t.

Paging Rodney Dangerfield
Most members of the press have an abiding need for respect — from readers, from newsmakers, from competitors and colleagues. In the case of Portnoy and his colleagues, though, such respect is hard to come by. One of my Phoenix co-workers calls Barstool Sports “a publication with no discernible reason for existing.” When I asked Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy, a favorite Barstool target, for his thoughts on the paper, his reply suggested that he’d never actually picked it up. (“I really don’t know what it is,” Shaughnessy told me.) Even Barstool’s writers seem vaguely ashamed by their affiliation: during a recent group interview, four of the paper’s editorial mainstays (Jamie Chisholm, Jerry Thornton, Pete Manzo, and Katie Cawley, author of Barstool’s “From Her Perspective” column) each asked that I not mention their day jobs.

Still, Barstool is growing — thriving, even. Which, given the paper’s humble origins, seems like a minor miracle. Flash back to 2003: recently fired from his sales job at a high-tech startup, Swampscott native and University of Michigan graduate David Portnoy is collecting unemployment checks and dreaming of entrepreneurial success. “I had every idea, from starting a used-furniture store for college kids — pick up, like, trashy couches and then put them in a warehouse and sell them for, like, ten cents — to starting a scouting agency for Division III colleges,” Portnoy told me. “I just went through a bunch of ideas, and I came up with this one.”

The Most Hated Man in Boston To understand the tortured tango that binds Dan Shaughnessy and his detractors, consider his item about Red Sox ace Curt Schilling’s blog, 38 Pitches.

A libertarian's view of the Barstool/Brady child-porn fiasco Sophisticated First Amendment scholars, lawyers, and media commentators, all of whom are strongly free-speech/free-press supporters, were critical of Coakley for allegedly engaging in a legal bluff — the veiled threat of possible prosecution under the state's child-porn statute — to convince Portnoy to remove the offending and exploitative image from his site.

BULLY FOR BU! | March 12, 2010 After six years at the Phoenix , I recently got my first pre-emptive libel threat. It came, most unexpectedly, from an investigative reporter. And beyond the fact that this struck me as a blatant attempt at intimidation, it demonstrated how tricky journalism's new, collaboration-driven future could be.

STOP THE QUINN-SANITY! | March 03, 2010 The year is still young, but when the time comes to look back at 2010's media lowlights, the embarrassing demise of Sally Quinn's Washington Post column, "The Party," will almost certainly rank near the top of the list.

RIGHT CLICK | February 19, 2010 Back in February 2007, a few months after a political neophyte named Deval Patrick cruised to victory in the Massachusetts governor's race with help from a political blog named Blue Mass Group (BMG) — which whipped up pro-Patrick sentiment while aggressively rebutting the governor-to-be's critics — I sized up a recent conservative entry in the local blogosphere.

RANSOM NOTES | February 12, 2010 While reporting from Afghanistan two years ago, David Rohde became, for the second time in his career, an unwilling participant rather than an observer. On October 29, 1995, Rohde had been arrested by Bosnian Serbs. And then in November 2008, Rohde and two Afghan colleagues were en route to an interview with a Taliban commander when they were kidnapped.

POOR RECEPTION | February 08, 2010 The right loves to rant against the "liberal-media elite," but there's one key media sector where the conservative id reigns supreme: talk radio.